Goblin Digest - April 25
I felt a little detached from the broader community in April. I got a few gags in on Discord and ran my home game, but I spent less time reading blogposts and more time on writing for work. That means that each of the following posts really rose to the occasion - a gem scintillating brightly enough that I dropped everything to read it.
As ever, I'm sharing a mix of GLoGposts towards the hypothetical end of organizing a "GLoGgies" at the end of the year. These categories are provisional; I mark the posts that don't quite fit with an *.
Honorable mention to Hilander's Felwood - a whole game shared on Discord, but not in a blogpost so disqualified on technical grounds.
Gameable
- Whose Measure God Could Not Take: d20 Cargo Robots - Really a bit of a spark table. I've had this pinned to my virtual GM screen for the scifi game I'm running and thus the only gameable content here I have actually gamed.
- Goodberry Monthly: TENEBRIS - Twilight City - Part of a series, but I think I could run a full campaign with just the details (and implications) of this post.\
- Garamondia: The Nomad Kingdoms * - Difficult to categorize; a setting, a culture, many different mechanical descriptions of weapon systems, all rolled into one. I think of this as almost the "High GLoG" style: great content rendered as long form prose.
- Whose Measure God Could Not Take: Stone Bodies (Location: Tomb of the Orchard-Burning General) - A whole dungeon! It feels like a classic D&D space (a tome with vermin and zombies and such), but nothing feels boilerplate or shoehorned in.
- Garamondia: Two Rooms, Two Monsters - Chem Pit Burial - I honestly could take or leave this particular dungeon, but the precedent here has legs. d2 monsters, d4+1 rooms is going places. Note the d666 table of monsters recorded within.
Theory
- The Furtive Goblin's Burrow: Earning XP Through Community Investment - Really a close reading / critical evaluation of an article from Dragon. My ears perk up at reappraisals of XP-for-gold, especially those with the potential to break that system away from being so colonial.
- Coins and Scrolls: Tariffs, CanCon, and You - I didn't expect a detailed account of the the theoretical text supporting the current US tariff debacle in my rpg feed, but I do welcome it.
- Was It Likely?: put good art in your games * - the bad doctor has a habit of writing posts that are mostly great critical writing on games or exhortations to a particular style with just a dash of gameable content that makes categorization complicated. They're all great.
Class
- 400 independent bathrooms: Parts Bin, April 2025 - Technically 15 classes, each of them exemplifying the porous boundary between a GLoG class and weird prose-poetry.
Fluffpost
- Shadow & Fae: West of Lune * - A Ghibli inspired setting. I'm sorting it here, because its quite a high level overview - more a setting-post than something I could bring directly to the table.
- Coins and Scrolls: Sidrak and Bokkus: 415 Medieval Questions - I love a jagged table of semi-coherent folk wisdom. I love a detailed breakdown of a medieval text. I defy the gesture towards "gameable content" at the end though. I could maybe roll on this, but really I'd just steep in it.